Unending plaudits

Writer Kate Summerscale discusses fictional diaries in The Telegraph:

Journals began to vie with letters as a narrative device in the 18th century, and they underpin some of the most captivating Victorian novels. The diary of a desperately unhappy wife lies at the heart of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and the diary of Marian Halcombe is the strongest strand of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859). In each case, the woman’s tale twists when her secret story falls into the hands of her enemy. The journal of Brontë’s heroine is wrested from her by her cruel husband; the journal of Collins’s heroine by the dastardly Count Fosco.

The Music takes a look at some of the films shown at the Sydney Film Festival (June 12-17), such as Wuthering Heights 2011.

Wuthering Heights finds Andrea Arnold fearlessly flaying the frockery from Emily Brontë’s eternal text, this unfaithful but full-blooded adaptation embracing the brutal ferocity of charged, passionate, possessive love. It’s effectively dank, dirty, foul-mouthed socio-realism on the wiley, windy moors: naturally-lit, free from score, and almost without dialogue. It’s a work of immaculate sound-design (oh, how that wind howls) and glowing cinematography; a piece of pure cinema whose radical adaptation of canonical classic-lit deserves unending plaudits. (Anthony Carew)

LA/OC Arts Examiner advances some information on a forthcoming stage adaptation of Jane Eyre at the University of California, Irvine (opening next September):

If you were quick on the draw, you caught “The Lost Estate” earlier this month in UCI’s Experimental Media Performance Lab. This imaginative piece, adapted and directed by Annie Loui, told a story of young love found and lost, set in the French countryside circa 1900. It was unusually challenging—and rewarding—for both the viewer and the performer, with actors portraying rocks, trees, horses and the like, in addition to dozens of characters. Keep your eyes peeled for Loui’s next “devised theater work,” an adaptation of “Jane Eyre" slated for Labor Day Weekend. (Jordan Young)

We suppose it will have something to do with these videos from a few months ago. The music of the production is by Dana Benedict and a piece can be listened here.

Another Jane Eyre (sort of) as The Monthly describes this video by Keaton Henson as

a three-minute close-up of a Jane Eyre–like figure (Richard Guilliatt)

Jane Eyre is the favourite book of a teacher in the Ionia County Sentinel-Standard and of a student in the Tampa Bay Times. Lazos y raíces discusses the novel in Spanish. Wuthering Heights is discussed by Something to Say and Books by Brookie. Is not poetry the food of love? writes in Portuguese about Anne Brontë. Euro Crime posts about the upcoming Joanna Campbell Slan Death of a Schoolgirl. The Jane Eyre Chronicles.

Finally, the Vivat Trust has uploaded to Flickr a lush set of pictures featuring North Lees Hall (possible model for Thornfield Hall).